Persuaded Arguments

Actually, research shows the gender pay gap does still exist e.g. http://leametz.pbworks.com/f/Gender pay gap has narrowed, but changed little in past decade.pdf which finds "The gender gap in pay has narrowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2017, women earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 47 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2017."

Also if men and women have the same opportunities, then if a study was conducted where identical CVs were sent out for men and women there should be no statistically significant deviation based on gender, should there? Then how do you explain studies like say https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/35/2/187/5370650 which tests this and finds "Empirically, we were able to demonstrate that employers do discriminate against women in their hiring processes"

It depends. What country are you talking about? In Iran or Nigeria, the opportunities are certainly not equal. In the US or France, they are fairly equal.

Gender pay gap is just a statistical fact describing the average differences in hourly earnings between two genders. Its existence or non-existence in itself does not indicate whether opportunities are equal or not, as a lot of factors come into play.

Opportunities certainly are not equal in certain professions. In the moving industry, women have almost no place, even strong muscular women. On the other hand, in the nursing industry, men are rarely taken seriously. In something more neutral, like the STEM field, the opportunities in the developed world are pretty much equal, but men and women make statistically different choices, so you end up with non-equal proportions of genders. In such professions as a grocery store cashier or a McDonalds cook, genders are pretty equally represented, and the opportunities, again, are equal.

Blatant discrimination is very rare these days anywhere but in the least civilised cultures. But there is a lot of indirect discrimination happening to both genders, and even biases their perpetuators may not be aware of. A woman playing jazz guitar is going to raise a lot of brows around her, and while other jazz players might not consciously think low of her, they will still have difficulty accepting her fully - unless she is really-really good, and the players are really-really open-minded.

At the same time, market strongly discourages such behaviors when it comes to earnings. If the person can do the job well and is likely to net a profit to the employer, then the employer is strongly incentivised to hire that person regardless of their gender, and those who do not do so suffer terribly under the heavy pressure of the market forces. Paying qualified women less than your competitors do is a sure way to get behind in the market competition.

To summarise, as always, "it is complicated". Too many factors at play to make as definitive statements as you, @sing113, made.

@Ampersand&nbsp; "In 2017, women earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States." Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 47 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2017."

This is because women on average take worse paying majors, work in less well paid fields, hold less senior positions, are less likely to move for a job, take jobs that don't scale as well, work less overtime, take less dangerous jobs, etc (1). For example, 93% of workplace deaths are men (1), should we infer from this that men are being mal-treated at work because of their sex and that this is the reason for the difference in outcome? Or should we look at the fact that men on average choose more dangerous jobs? Note that the study you linked mentions that women are more likely to make career sacrifices for family, in addition to the fact that women are overrepresented in lower paying professions. These are major confounding factors in determining average and median pay.

Interestingly, when we look at young women, the gap is in the opposite direction; young women earn more than young men on average (2,3). Does this imply that the system is rigged against young men?

Look if anyone can show me a Man and a Woman who have the same qualifications, same education, same experience and work in the exact same job shoulder to shoulder and the Man gets paid more than the Woman...then I'll surrender right now. Send me the names of these two people, I'll verify that the information is correct and I'll concede right now. Otherwise this is just a ploy to dishonestly use statistical data to show how normal deviations between Men and Women(Maternity leave, differentiating interests ect) somehow equate inequality in the wage system between Men and Women.

"If there's no such thing as a stupid question then what kind of questions do stupid people ask"?

"There's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies through the veil of logical fallacies disguised as rational argument".

"Oh, you don't like my sarcasm? Well I don't much appreciate your stupid".